With so many injustices, small and great, across the world and right at our doorstep, what are people of faith to do? What if Christians were to shape their missional engagement around the implications of the truth that God is real and Jesus is risen? Alexia Salvatierra has developed a model of social action that is rooted in the values and convictions born of faith.

A faith-rooted approach takes seriously the active agency of God’s Spirit and our role in partnering with God to go beyond direct service to community development and organizing using approaches that are “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

This session will focus on faith foundations and orientation as well as key faith-rooted tools for social transformation. It will also point towards how we inspire and equip people to do justice, as Micah 6.8 describes, and address issues such as recruitment, leadership development, mobilizing churches and sustaining the movement.

This session features the Rev. Alexia Salvatierra and is open to all. Hosted by the School of Theology.

The Rev. Alexia Salvatierra is the co-author of “Faith-Rooted Organizing” and currently serves as adjunct faculty for seven seminaries, in the U.S. and in Latin America. She is an ordained Lutheran priest with 35 years of experience in community ministry. She also trains, coaches and consults with a wide variety of national and international ministries, including World Vision, the Christian Community Development Association and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. For over 20 years, she has been a national leader in the area of immigrant rights and the struggle for immigration reform. For over a decade, she was the executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice of California, focused primarily on issues of working poverty. She is the proud mother of a 22-year-old activist. For more information, please visit her website: http://www.alexiasalvatierra.com/bio.html

On Monday, Oct. 3, from 3 to 5 p.m., Salvatierra will join the Rev. Kammy Young's Transforming Congregations & Communities class as part of Young's semester-long interdisciplinary course which was collaboratively created by School of Theology faculty and students and adapted from the works of Marshall Ganz of Harvard University and the Direct Action & Research Training Center, Leadership Development Initiative. The course explores various biblical and theological perspectives on practices that use relational power to bring about political, economic, social and spiritual transformation. If you would like to sit in on the class,please contact Young for information about attending.